Sense of Place, Sense of Mystery

﻿ by Herb Kauderer

(The introduction to Pulp: Poems in the Pulp Tradition by Scott E. Green, September 2004.)

An introduction to a poetry collection ought to give the reader an introduction to the poet, and his career, as well as to the poetry about to be read, so I’ll take those tasks in order. In recent years every time I see Scott Green he seems thinner, but is still a large man, perhaps six feet five inches tall. Now that his full head of dark hair has finally had the good grace to go a little gray, Scott has the physical aspect of a retired NFL Defensive Tackle who looks like he could still toss around offensive linemen. He has a big deep voice that, with training, would easily be good enough for radio broadcasting.

Scott is an anecdotal speaker full of digressions, stories, reminiscences, and background material. He is knowledgeable in many fields, especially aspects of popular culture from the 20th century. He knows pulps and a lot more. Like poetry. Scott knows a lot about poetry. When I just discovering Answer poems, Scott was publishing volumes of them in homage to scores of important writers. You’ll find examples of them in this collection. More amazing to me is that Scott knows a lot of poetry. I remember at the 1998 WorldCon poetry reading Scott showed up with empty hands. He recited from memory. He had hundreds of poems in his head, and chose them based on subject matter and resonance with the previous poet’s reading.

In conversation Scott goes in many directions unable to keep up with the torrent of ideas pouring through his mind at any given time. But when he writes those ideas down, he takes small bites. He is tightly focused and brutally efficient. Scott unpacks his thoughts into a poem and moves onto the next without digression. Scott is a champion of brevity, precision, and word choice. He often says more in twenty words than others can say in a dozen stanzas. Ten lines is usually considered a short poem. This collection has ten poems that are five lines or less. And consider the words and phrases he uses. “Marvin scampers.” Centaurs “nickerigh.” Giza’s Sphinx has “limestone flesh.” “WASP blue,” “night gaunts,” “eye fangs,” “finny Caddies” on Rt. 66.

In Pulp Scott’s poetry will take you on an amazing geographic journey. The poems have a strong sense of exotic locale just as the pulps of old, from Chicago to Portales, Appalachia to the Gulf of Finland, Amber to Mars, Arkham to Rhode Island. As Scott explores the strangeness, the macabre, the noir, the adventure, the meanness of the pulps, he often updates, skews, modernizes, reverences, and reinvents, pulp traditions. But he never forgets the most important element of pulp entertainment. Mystery.

The pulp detectives delved into mysteries. The twisted horrors of the Weird Fantasy magazines explored mysteries of our cultural psyche. The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the other pulp heroes were known as “men of mystery.” The travel pulps went to unknown places. The science fiction pulps looked at the mysteries of the future and past. And Pulp brings back the mystery, chewed down to the hardened well-gnawed bones of Scott Green’s poetry.